Saturday, 13 October 2012

Swiatoslaw Wojtkowiak: The Sufi Connection

Swiatoslaw Wojtkowiak has been busy. He is authoring a blog, and from what I've seen of it so far, it's about his spiritual peripatetic peregrinations and pilgrimages in India and Pakistan. Hard-core Sufi pilgrimages...some that I haven't even heard of.

He recently walked from Delhi to Ajmer (in Rajasthan)accompanied by several hundred fakirs; real or charlatans, it doesn't matter. Accompanied by men (and possibly women) whose fraternity is based on "if you have one chapati, and there is two of you, share it in two pieces, if you are four, share in four, if there is eight, share for eight” …” Blessed are those who have nothing”.Double exposures, blurs, Holga...nothing is orthodox in Swiatoslaw's photography, and in his journals. Read his entries, and you'll realize there's more depth there than you may have thought.

And Swiatoslaw Wojtkowiak is also an accomplished, and more orthodox, photographer as his travel photographs attest. He tells me his first name in Polish means 'praising the world', and he has lived up to it very appropriately.

About The Travel Photographer

Based in New York City, I am a freelance photographer specializing in documenting endangered cultures
and traditional life ways of Asia, Latin America and Africa. My images, articles and photo features were published in various magazines, and my travel photographs were featured by some of the largest adventure travel companies in the United States and Great Britain, as well as in multinational corporations' art collections. My photographs have been acquired by a range of eclectic buyers; from the Standard Chartered’ Bank's permanent art collection to Spike TV.

I also organize and lead photo expeditions and workshops for photographers who share my enthusiasm for unusual cultures,
uncommon locations and lesser known festivals. I'm a faculty member at the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop, and give workshops at the Travel Photographer Society (Kuala Lumpur).